Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced a plan last month to finally modernize the country’s crumbling air traffic control infrastructure, which is estimated to cost $31 billion. While Duffy and other Trump administration officials are quick to claim that they inherited a broken system from President Joe Biden, they poured gasoline on the dumpster fire they walked into. The Federal Aviation Administration is assessing the impact of losing over 1,200 employees in Trump’s deferred-resignation program, an initiative to reduce government spending by shrinking the federal workforce.
An internal presentation to senior FAA management from early May, obtained by the Wall Street Journal, emphasized the loss of institutional knowledge and experience caused by the gutting of the agency’s experts. This is an entirely different story from what the White House disseminated when the deferred-resignation program began in January. The program, in short, dangled a carrot of months-long paid leave for employees to resign or prematurely retire. The Trump administration downplayed the potential consequences because air traffic controllers, inspectors and other front-line safety personnel weren’t eligible.
Air traffic controllers aren’t the only people who work at the FAA
The White House’s line of thought is that if they aren’t reporting to an air traffic control tower, then their job isn’t essential. Agency management is concerned that the mass departures could negatively impact work to improve runway safety and medical clearance processing for pilots and controllers. What is the point of allocating billions of dollars to modernizing systems at nearly 90 airports if there isn’t anyone to implement it?
The Trump administration’s actions to address the decline in air safety have been scatter-brained at best. On one hand, President Trump wants to dish out a single massive contract to one company to complete all of the modernization work. However, the FAA is fast-tracking the training of air traffic control trainees to fill these revamped towers and other facilities. I want to believe this will be a genuine effort to improve air safety, but the recent past says otherwise. While the White House is fixated on reducing the federal budget, it continues to give massive deals to its allies, like the State Department giving Tesla a $400 million contract for armored electric vehicles.
